I've recently come back to Urban Rivals and looking to play again. Been thinking about the Daily Tournies and trying to figure out what kind of deck to play. I'm running into a familiar conundrum and looking for some thoughts.

In this game like most any relatively balanced TCG, there is a rough rock/paper/scissors system. Execpt with so many options, there's a whole junkdrawer available. However, the decks I've seen still fall into some rough categories:

Decks seem to be either hit 'em hard and fast, mess with them, or shut them down....or a combination of two. There's other variants, but that's what I seem to categorize decks into.

Now, not a a stereotype or a rule, but generally Aggro beats Counter due to big beefy dmg guys smashing in 2-3 rounds. Manipulation can (theoretically) mess with aggro enough for later turn wins. Counter takes away Manipulation's tools. In proper matchups with well funed decks, in theory you should expect at least 50/50 against your favorable matchup, and less than that against bad matchups. Solid play and tactics makes up for some of that as well.

Now, where I'm going with all this. Daily Tournaments favors winning quickly. The more wins, the higher the ranking, etc. Also, aggro decks tend to take the initiative where manipulation have more guessing to do, more thought to shrug off as much pain as possible and survive long enough to win. Not to say aggro decks are easy to play, but perhaps easier than manip. So there would seem to be a natural bias towards the aggro decks. Smash and crush decks, make up for discons with quick matches, etc. This would lead me to believe that there's more than average number of aggro decks out there that are topping the scoreboards.

So, my thought was that a manipulation deck that can weather the storm and pull out the late round win would be ideal as a meta choice. Also, a manip deck would need to win quite a large percentage of their matches to keep in the points hunt whereas aggro could shrug off a loss or two and make up for it witha quick 2HKO or discon given the larger number of matches they will have.

A few questions then:
1) Is my logic totally flawed?
2) If not, can a manipulation deck with the current cards out there survive three rounds of nasty?
3) What's a better mechanic to use againt aggro? -dmg/reducer, +life, +pills?

You are over thinking this, and yet at the same time you are over simplifying it all

you said this
"Now, where I'm going with all this. Daily Tournaments favors winning quickly"

ill add this too... DTs also favour losing quickly

it also favours lower star counts, but low star count probably means slower kills.... but more points. so one has to find a balance

decks that manipulate life are typically too slow
decks can be made/designed to counter aggressive 2 hit kill decks... the problem is you will take longer to win your games. the aggressive deck can simply win and lose games faster than your slower deck. therefore the faster deck will typically outscore other decks

Right. Was kind of the point I was getting at. Whether it was possible to make a slow deck that mauls 2HKO and win at a higher percentage of the time to make up for less games played, or if the DT format just favors aggro so heavily that aggro is really the only way to go.

And you're right as well....overthinking cause....well...there's a heck of a lot of solid deck options and oversimplifying because I didn't want the question to be a page long.

It seems like Aggro will always come out on top due to the points system and the fact that tournaments run off of real time but each game exactly does not. SO aggro has the advantage because they can finish a game in 2 rounds which might last 1 minute 30 seconds while someone else without aggro would have to play for the full 4 rounds which might take 4 minutes.

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